New York’s Segregated Schools Need New Answers

Friday’s Bloomberg article confirmed a longtime suspicion about New York public schools: New York State has the most segregated schools in the United States. It seems counterintuitive, as New York is a Northern state never subjected to Jim Crow. But the deep-seated economic inequalities in New York have created a new form of segregation that exist outside the rule of law but nonetheless affect the opportunities of thousands of students, many of whom will be firmly stuck in the cycle of poverty before they even begin their first day of kindergarten. In a state asliberal as New York, a haven for unions, powerful Democratic politicians, and organizers, those who champion the underdog and preach equality for all are failing the very people they claim to help.

Part of what drives this segregation in New York State is the economic stratification of New York City. Simply put, students from low-income households attend failing public schools, while students from wealthier families have their choice of charter schools, specialized high schools, or private schools. Stuyvesant High School, the most famous and selective specialized high school in New York City, offers admission to whomever passes their rigorous examination, regardless of economic background or ethnicity, but only seven black students were admitted this year, down from nine last year. While there is no law prohibiting black or Latino students from attending to Stuyvesant, low-income families often do not have the resources to help their children prepare for such a rigorous entrance exam. Additionally, if the student is an English learner, he or she will have a steeper uphill battle to receive an even passable education.

One possible factor that could explain such segregation is housing discrimiation. Jamelle Bouie, in one of his last pieces for The Daily Beast, described in stark detail the consistent and systematic methods by which blacks, many of whom were migrants seeking opportunities in the North, were prevented from securing stable housing. The result was the creation of the ghettos that sprung up in Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, and East Coast ones like Baltimore. The schools in these areas often underperform, with high dropout rates and low test scores in reading and math.

In cities like New York, low-income neighborhoods have seen little improvement in their local public schools. In the 1960s, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, black and Latino children were integrated into predominately white schools, but nothing was done to fix the dilapidated schools they were extracted from, which have limped into the 21st century leaving thousands of dropouts in their wake. In 2014, the battleground for achieving greater educational equality has been charter schools, publicly-funded but privately-run schools that often share space with decrepit public schools. One bone of contention in the controversy is the accusation that charter schools siphon resources from public schools.

It’s true that suffering schools are not directly linked to any particular liberal policy. But the fact cannot be ignored that New York public schools, despite gains made under the Bloomberg administration, are still woefully inadequate. Only 66 percent of New York City high school students graduate, of whom a paltry 47 percent were ready for college, according to data released in December 2013. The bureaucratic maze and insufficient funding make it impossible for students to have their basic needs met to acquire the academic skills to lift them out of poverty and put them on the path to success. New York has long been regarded a bastion of liberal efficiency and equality, an example to the rest of the country for its tolerance and diversity. But this gaping inequality can no longer be swept under the rug. Underpinning this segregation are racist housing policies and willful “scrubbing” of undesirable students from charter schools, which impede black upward mobility as much as the laws in the Jim Crow South. It’s time for New York politicians to understand that their methods for facilitating opportunity have failed, and be more open to new ideas, perhaps from the other side of the aisle.

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13 Responses to New York’s Segregated Schools Need New Answers

“It’s time for New York politicians to understand that their methods for facilitating opportunity have failed, and be more open to new ideas, perhaps from the other side of the aisle.”

Oh Ms. Romeyn-Sanabria: You call for this after near-literally devoting every single other sentence to the *identical* idea that’s been animating New York and other liberal politicians/educators? I.e. that it’s all somehow … the fault of Whites? Almost all of which they have intentionally or consciously incurred? (Never mind how stupid that would be for them, or the school taxes they’ve inflicted on themselves trying to solve the problems, or all the other evidence otherwise?)

And that of *course* the eternal problem is your alleged “insufficient funding”?

How about … even *one* sentence devoted, say, to the idea of questioning the continued the promotion of the reigning theology of multiculturalism and its amazing, unquestioned assumption that the only differences in values in different cultures are anodyne ones? Somehow miraculously not extending to the relative value placed on other things such as education, community, law and order and etc. and so forth?

Unless white do-gooders are willing to put their own children in 99 % minority schools, this whole exercise is one of hot air. I grew up in a school system destroyed by school busing in the 1970s. Dysfunctional people destroy school systems. The amount of money thrown into the system can not fix dysfunction.

Re: “Underpinning this segregation are racist housing policies and willful “scrubbing” of undesirable students from charter schools, which impede black upward mobility as much as the laws in the Jim Crow South.”

Reading the link it looks like the undesirable students are “scrubbed” for disciplinary reasons.

Unfortunately, those disruptive kids often exhibit sociopathic behaviors: See this example:

Scrubbing them does not impede their upward mobility, their underlying psychopathology does. I have no idea how to fix that. But retaining those problem children in the charter schools would do nothing but impede the upward mobility of the other kids (of any race) who actually want to learn, and the effectiveness of their teachers. The trouble makers aren’t going anywhere regardless of what school they are in.

The claim of racial segregation is a proxy. The real segregation is an attempt to fence out a large cohort of disturbed kids who choose to negatively infect any environment in which they live.

After 45 years of housing laws which interfere in free association and the right to contract, after forced bussing, after magnet schools, after massive immigration driven demographic change, it’s time to face the fact that the characteristics of black and Latino neighborhoods and aren’t white people’s fault.

The boro with the highest concentration of whites is Staten Island, which is isolated from the rest of the city. Most of the white kids who live in the other boros, if they can’t get an elite public school, go to religious schools. If that is not possible, the parents move to the suburbs. Similar patterns exist in the rest of the state, and probably the rest of the country.

Only 66 percent of New York City high school students graduate, of whom a paltry 47 percent were ready for college, according to data released in December 2013. The bureaucratic maze and insufficient funding make it impossible for students to have their basic needs met to acquire the academic skills to lift them out of poverty and put them on the path to success.

The average spending in city schools has increased dramatically since Mayor Bloomberg took office — but bigger bucks haven’t always produced higher graduation rates, documents obtained by the Daily News show.

Per student spending in the city jumped from roughly $11,000 in 2001-02, right before Bloomberg took office, to $14,000 in 2004-05, according to expenditure documents.

It then skyrocketed to about $19,000 in 2010-11, the year for which data are most recently available.

The increased spending has been targeted especially to the districts where schools are struggling the most through a program called Fair Student Funding, which began in 2008.

“Insufficient funding” is not the problem. It has never been the problem. The problem is the students themselves. That’s why the schools are segregated: middle and upper class parents are desperate to keep their kids away from students from lower class background. And with good reason. Failing to acknowledge this and the role it plays in shaping the demographics of school systems is like trying to figure out why the Cleveland Browns were so bad last year without mentioning Brandon Weeden’s 70.3 QB rating.

As a white dude in New Jersey, progressive hypocrisy in NYC is hilarious, as I don’t have to deal with its immediate effects. Even the great (white) progressive hope, Bill DeBlasio, has continued the obvious racist stop-and-frisk regime.

Anybody taking only the last forty-five years of housing laws is either deliberately trying to obscure the causes of segregated pattens in inner cities or is simply unaware of them. The reason Jamelle Bouie’s article begins with the 1930s and 1940s is that this is when the problem originated. The FHA allowed local officials to use redlining to force blacks into crowded areas with low quality housing stock and services. It also enforced racial covenants until Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 finally outlawed the practice (after the damage was done). HOLC would refuse to underwrite mortgages for people in redlined areas, making it virtually impossible for blacks to obtain mortgages except from predatory loan sharks.
In his Bancroft Prize winning book on Detroit, Thomas Sugrue says that, as late as 1951, only 1.15% of new homes constructed in metropolitan Detroit were available to blacks.
A similar story is told by Beryl Satter in her book about Chicago, ‘Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America’.

All of the damage had already been done by the time we got to 45 years ago. This is a story of Federal sanction and support for local racist policies from the 1930s. Anybody wanting to know the full story could do a lot worse than consult the two urban histories I mentioned.

Agree with others: racially segregated schools are not a problem that needs to be fixed. If some schools are bad and underfunded, then fix those; you don’t have to integrate them to do that.

My own experience is similar to Derek’s above. As a child, I watched as my schools and community were destroyed by racial so-called integration. People who haven’t lived through something like that can’t even imagine what a disaster it is. And the worst part of it, as Hannah Arendt wrote in her “Reflections on Little Rock” (and in her response to critics), is that desegregationists are using children to fight the adults’ political battles. Believe me, it can be a horrible experience for a young child to live through.

Enlightening observation from my wife who pays attention to these things that high academically performing African American children can get scholarships into private school because those schools are looking for diversity. Apparently she knows an African American family who have benefited from this (that’s not a critique, btw, good luck to them and well done, etc). So, perhaps that accounts for some of the low numbers going into Stuyvesant, but still only seven is shockingly low.

“Anybody taking only the last forty-five years of housing laws is either deliberately trying to obscure the causes of segregated pattens in inner cities or is simply unaware of them.”

I am quite aware of them. I view them as a response by the white community (or really, mostly various communities of “white ethnics”) to preserve what they had built, created or formed. They may have been an unjust response in the abstract, but they did limit white flight and the deterioration of neighborhoods.

At any rate, the statement still stands. We have had 45 years of incredibly aggressive ‘civil rights’ enforcement in all areas of housing. And yet, we still get Detroit.

Coming from a working-class background, I attended San Francisco public schools in the 1970s and 80s, the era of forced busing. Although the school system wasn’t perfect, I had several outstanding teachers. Looking at some old class photos, I notice that my classmates came from diverse backgrounds in more ways than one. Today, the SFUSD is largely poor and nonwhite, with the usual consequences, although Asian students continue to do well. Despite the requisite lip service, white liberals have abandoned the public school system, enrolling their kids in private schools, or placing them in a handful of public schools in affluent neighborhoods. The perceived segregation they abhorred in the past, and attempted to fix via ill-fated social programs, is now a reality.

I can’t speak to Derek’s and Aaron’s experiences but I’ll relate a bit of my own.

We moved from a Long Island suburb into a private housing project in East Harlem in 1960 because my Dad worked in New York. My older siblings went to elementary school in the neighborhood but the school started to decline. The city was busing kids from our district into the Upper East Side’s school district because, as my parents explained it, so many of the kids from that neighborhood were being sent to private schools that their public schools had lots of open seats. So, kids from East Harlem – white, black and Latino – were bused downtown while kids from the West Side – mostly white – took the cross-town bus or subway to attend elementary and junior high schools on the Upper East Side alongside middle class white kids who mostly lived west of Lexington (or was it Third?) Avenue and working class white kids from east of Lexington (a neighborhood completely gentrified by the end of the 80’s, I think). I’ve never since had so racially or ethnically diverse a group of friends, some of whom remain so to this day.

The Upper East Side schools I went to were rigorously tracked, I assume based on test results of some kind. I was generally in the B-level classes in elementary school, my younger brother in the C-level. In junior high, I was in the A+ track while he was still in the C-track. Both of us nevertheless got into Stuyvesant and college and, eventually, forged professional careers, so I tend to think that the tracking was less of a factor than our family’s socio-economic and educational background.

Two major differences between NYC in the 1970’s and the 20-teens: bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, proletarian and lumpen proletarian families could live within two, three or four avenues (East to West) or a few blocks (North to South) of each on either side of Central Park and attend the same churches or temples, shop in the same supermarkets or send their kids to the same public or parochial schools, even if it wasn’t always in the neighborhood that you lived in. With the gutting of the manufacturing sector of the city’s economy, the off-shoring of jobs, the steady rollback of rent control and stabilization, wave after wave of co-op and condo conversions, a fall in moderate and low-income housing development and an explosion of luxury development, New York is no longer much of a middle class or working class town, so those interactions among peers but across class, race AND (not OR) ethnicity are less likely to happen.

The other difference concerns Stuyvesant. The only prep we had for the exam to get into Stuy, Bronx Science (Ptui! Ptui!) or Brooklyn Tech was a voluntary class offered by a social studies teacher in our junior high. No Japanese or Korean-style “cram” schools and I seriously doubt anyone got private tutoring, either. My parents paid for singing lessons to give me a shot at my back-up school, Music and Art, but I think we would have been insulted if anyone suggested we pay for lessons to take the test for the elite math and science high schools. Not surprisingly, given all of the above, the black student population of Stuyvesant was never higher than in the late 1970’s at around 13% of the student body.

I am skeptical of making much progress on integrating the schools when the city is less integrated by class than it has ever been. I’m in favor of broadening the factors considered for admission to the elite public high schools to include class grades (Gasp!) and a portfolio of past projects, papers or even cultural experiences (for instance, the month I spent in Sweden as an 11-year old exchange student). Which brings up another point, the over-emphasis on schools in the first place, but that’s a topic for another post.